Very Far From Home
by Never-Clip-My-Wings-x
Summary: Ambre is sixteen, living alone in Paris with her younger sister following the death of her alcoholic mother. She leaves for London with two suitcases containing everything they own, and upon arrival meets a certain Quartermaster, thinking nothing of him until the events that unfold when the villain MI6 have spent years trying to trace comes to find Ambre to get to them.


**_This is my first fic in this category, and yes, it's a bit of a generic "Bond-has-a-daughter" type one, but hopefully it's a little different. The only characters I own are Ambre and Lillia, and it's set pre-Skyfall. I very much hope that the small amount of French dialogue is grammatically correct, but I doubt it is - anyway, enjoy and review!_**

* * *

Her eyes were large, blue and a beautiful feline shape, with dark, curling lashes opening them up to reveal hidden tones of gold and grey. Her skin was very slightly tanned; the olive tone setting off the sapphire of her eyes and making her look far healthier than she was - had she been a little paler, others would have noticed the dark circles under her eyes and the scars blemishing her skin, but as it was, they remained well camouflaged. She was tall, with legs a little longer than they should be, like a young foal before it was fully grown.

She looked incredibly out of place in London, standing out from the crowds of people not only because of her looks, but because of the way she carried herself and dressed. Many men chased her, many women envied her, but for the most part, she was a lone wolf. Wild; untameable; free. Or at least that was how she appeared.

She had grown up in Paris, living there with her mother and younger sister, until her mother had died and she'd been left, aged fifteen, with a five year old sister, no money and no family to speak of. Her father, she'd been told, was British, but she'd never met him - her mother claimed that this was because he didn't want to know, but the girl herself was pretty sure that he just didn't know. Her mother was like that; dreamy, forgetful, calm yet fiery without warning. She supposed that perhaps she'd inherited some of that trait, but her mother had always told her, usually when she was drunk and spiteful, that she was the living image of her father, and by God, she'd hated her for it. Her mother had been a mean, aggressive, angry drunk, and that was her usual state; drunk. Hardly surprising that she died so young, but selfish nonetheless, leaving her daughters with nothing more than empty bottles, maxed out credit cards and her male customers knocking at the door at all hours, threatening the oldest until she'd give them what they'd came for while her little sister lay in bed in the next room.

Getting out of that flat was the girl's greatest ambition in life, but in satisfying the ambition, all hell would be released.

* * *

She was sixteen when she took her meagre possessions from the cramped Parisian flat and boarded a plane, after much persuasion of the man at the booking desk, from Charles De Gaulle Airport to London's Heathrow, along with her sister who had just turned six. She didn't know what they were going to do in London, or even if they'd manage to live there, but had decided that a fresh start away from France was their best option.

She had two passports; French and British, although she'd never met anyone from her father's British side. She hoped that the latter passport would enable her to get work more easily in London, doing whatever she could to earn a living and keep herself and her sister in any flat possible. She didn't even know her father's full name, she realised - his last name was Bond, and that was the full extent of her knowledge. She had no idea where he lived, what he looked like, what he did for a living... her mother had made up different stories every week to please her curious daughter. She could be sitting next to her father on this very flight, and she wouldn't know.

"Ambre, où sommes-nous?" the young child had asked her older sister, gazing out of the window of the plane with her round, blue eyes. She'd never been on a plane before - she'd only ever been out of Paris when her mother had taken her and her sister away to a town in the middle of nowhere in an attempt to hide from a man whose name she didn't know. Her big sister told her that he was bad and scary, and so she'd assumed that, like all the bad characters in the books Ambre read to her, the bad man had simply disappeared when they returned to Paris.

"Je trouve nous sommmes en France toujours, Lillia." Ambre responded, without opening her eyes, still imagining what her father looked like. Her favourite tale of him that her mother had made up was that he worked as a spy; a secret agent in the British services. The more likely one, she imagined, was that he was just an ordinary man who worked in a bank in London; one of hundreds - thousands, probably. Still, dreaming couldn't be of any harm, she supposed.

"Lillia, quand nous sommes en Bretagne, nous devons parler Anglais, oui?" she added, hoping that the young girl would remember. She'd tried to teach her English as she'd grown up, but her mother didn't approve - she said that it was her father's language, and she was forbidden to speak it under her roof. Ambre had learnt it at school, and it had been her favourite subject - had she been able to afford it, she'd have studied translation at a university.

"Oui." the little girl said, a slight sadness in her voice. She switched her gaze from the sky outside her window to the stewardess making her way down the aisle of the aircraft in a red pencil skirt and white shirt, watching her with the sort of admiration that young girls had for women older than themselves. She didn't understand what the woman was saying - she understood basic English words and phrases, but couldn't comprehend the words of the stewardess. She watched the way that men looked at the woman, and the way she looked at them in return - they stared at her as Lillia thought an animal might stare at its food, and the stewardess served them with a guarded look; trying to close her crisp white shirt and cover as much flesh from view as she could. Lillia had seen many men look at her sister in that way, and wondered why the woman seemed so scared by them. Ambre never was.

Eventually, Lillia fell asleep, tiring of watching the clouds in the sky and the people on the plane. Ambre took her jacket off and laid it over her sister's sleeping form, stroking her long, chocolate brown hair and staring out of the window. They were in Britain now, she thought - unless her geography was even worse than she thought, they'd just crossed the Channel, and were now getting closer to London. The only time she'd been out of the country was when she'd ran away with a boyfriend last year, just before her mother's death, when Lillia had been on a school trip to Versailles and her mother had been busy drinking herself stupid, as usual. They'd got as far as Belgium when Ambre had realised that she couldn't leave Lillia with her mother, and had hitchhiked her way back to Paris. She didn't know what had happened to the boyfriend - he was probably still in Belgium somewhere.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into London Heathrow airport; please fasten your seatbelts, secure the drop-down trays back to the seats and open window blinds. Thank you." The captain's voice didn't even make Lillia stir; her glossy hair falling in front of her angelic face and her sister's leather jacket pulled tight around her in a stark contrast to her innocent looks. Ambre sat staring at the seat in front of her, suddenly realising exactly how real the whole situation was - she was taking her six year old sister to a strange city in a strange country, with the intention of trying to earn a living in a place where they didn't even speak their first language.

And she thought to herself that a new start could only mean that things would get better. In the short run, she didn't have a clue just how wrong she was.

* * *

She took her French passport out of her bag, along with her sister's. She hated her photograph - her dark brown hair looked frizzy and her eyes looked partially closed, but it still managed to identify her.

_Ambre Lisa Bond-Masson_, born in Paris on the 28th of May, 1996, and her sister, _Lillia Elise Cohen-Masson_, born on the fourteenth day of July, 2006. Lillia looked so innocent in her photo; nobody would know the things those round, bluish grey eyes had seen in their mere six years.

Ambre sighed as she took her sister's hand and joined the Immigration queue, surrounded by people of all nationalities - most of them on holiday, some perhaps coming to Britain to live. She couldn't see anyone quite as young as she was in the same situation; alone in a strange country with no parents, and no family other than a young sister. She didn't wish the situation upon anybody.

* * *

After a small altercation with a customs officer over whether she was allowed to take Lillia from France to Britain, they had managed to get through Immigration, claim their baggage (a large suitcase containing jewellery, a few clothes and some money, and a smaller one which Lillia insisted upon pulling, which contained the child's clothes and possessions), and head out of the airport, where they stood as Ambre looked for men who she could convince to give her some advice, some money or a lift into London. Spotting a young man with dark, slightly wavy hair, who wore black trousers, a white shirt and a skinny tie, she approached him, arranging her hair as she went.

"Excuse me, do you know where I could get a room to stay? Not expensive, just enough for my sister and I." Ambre indicated Lillia, who was stood by the taxi rank with a suitcase which must have been as heavy as she was next to her. The man looked a little surprised by Ambre's question, and adjusted his glasses before responding;

"Well, you could try the hotel over there - there might be a room for tonight that they'll give you cheaply." He had a sharp, relatively posh accent, the French girl recognised, and appeared semi-nervous talking to her. She imagined that he was a computer programmer or had some such occupation - he was hardly the most brash, confident man she'd ever met. She heard a buzzing sound, and noticed that he had an earpiece in his left ear, mostly camouflaged by his hair, but still noticeable to her. She smiled at him, and he returned the expression before hurriedly making his way to a deserted part of the pavement and speaking, apparently to himself. Ambre's features still bore a faint smile as she returned to her sister, managing to slip a few notes out of a suit-wearing man's pocket as she went.

"Lillia, we're going to that hotel over there, okay?" The child nodded, taking the handle of the suitcase in one hand and her sister's hand in the other, and allowing herself to be led over to the large, modern building, going unnoticed as Ambre pilfered money from bags and pockets carelessly left open. If this was her new house, she wasn't very impressed, but she hoped it wouldn't have any strange men visiting, demanding money or a woman from Ambre whilst Lillia pulled her thin blankets around her and tried to block out the noises.

No, tonight, strange men wouldn't be demanding money, at least. But Ambre's apparently non-existent father and his job were about to have a greater effect on the sisters than they could ever have thought possible.


End file.
